Plot Structure Comparison: A Pale View of Hills and Waiting for the Barbarians Anna Colby College

Plot structure in any novel is an important literary technique that can differ greatly from one novel to another. While the actual story tells the reader the events that happen to the characters, the plot is the technique used to form a time line for the story, whether the events are placed in chronological order or not. The novels Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee and A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro have plot structures that do not conform to the basic idea of a story in chronological order as time passes by, however their structures are vastly different nonetheless.

In the novel A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro uses a very unique strategy to tell the story of Etsuko and her life. Instead of laying out the story in the present, he reaches back into Etsuko's memory to find the story. He structures the plot around her thoughts and memories to bring back the story of her life in a way that makes the reader pay close attention to detail in order to understand where the characters are in time throughout the book. Ishiguro uses Etsuko to lay out the novel, but Etsuko cannot necessarily be relied upon. The author uses memory to skew the timelines of the events that take place in the novel, making the plot of the novel...